There are lots of operations of obtaining products or intermediate products through industrial processing, such as reactions including a liquid-liquid reaction, a gas-liquid reaction, and a catalyst reaction, as well as generation of particles by crystallization.
Typical processing is illustrated in FIG. 23 in which component A, component B or component C are fed into a stirred contact processing reactor 1 and are stirred with a stirring blade 3 having a stirring motor 2 so as to facilitate the reactions of the components. Then, a product liquid is discharged through a discharge outlet 5 at appropriate timing and after that, crystallization particles are obtained by filtration, washing and drying for example. The reference numeral 4 is designated as a baffle 4.
In this processing, a large contact processing reactor 1 is necessary and stirring is performed with the stirring blade 3 for uniform reactions and processing. However, there is a limit beyond which the expectation for the uniform reactions cannot go.
Meanwhile batch processing cannot be applied with high efficiency where the components are fed into the contact processing reactor 1 and stirred afterward. On the other hand, a continuous production system can be applied with high efficiency where the components are continuously fed while they are stirred. However, in the continuous production system, it is difficult to set conditions for contact processing (ex. control of the amount of fed components with respect to lapse of time) so that homogenous products cannot be always efficiently obtained.
As an attempt to solve the above problems, a micro reactor having a flow path of 1 mm or less has been proposed. However, in such micro reactor, there are problems such as a small processing amount, failure of continuous production due to blockage of the flow path, resulting in small number of practical examples on an industrial scale.
A technology of allowing components to be in contact with other components when the components are moved in a cyclone system is disclosed in Patent Literature 1.